antti.vilpponen.net

Asmo already blogged about this, but since I want a little ego boost this morning - I’ll do it as well :) Our Finnish Playray site, Aapeli.com, is the second most known internet brand in Finland among the youth - only Google is more known. Taloustutkimus produced the survey and here’s the top ten this year:

1. Google
2. Aapeli
3. Hotmail
4. Habbo
5. IRC-galleria
6. Älypää
7. MTV3.fi
8. Luukku
9. Wikipedia
10. Nelonen

Google’s kind of hard to knock off the top spot, but let’s see where we’ll be next year :)

Woodpecker Film created a small christmas card a few years back for their clients. It was an overnight hit, spreading virally all over the internet. If you haven’t seen these yet, spend a few minutes doing so - they are excellent :) (and they make Finland look pretty nice, cold, harsh, but beautiful.)

Part one:

Part two:

Excellent pieces of art from Woodpecker Film.

A set of companies belonging to the RIAA sue the Russian AllofMP3.com for a whopping 1.65 trillion USD. That’s a lot of money. BBC, for example has the story, but let me compare this number to some other figures:

1. The Russian GDP is appr. $1.576 trillion (src)
2. According to RIAA, music industry losses are $4.2 billion because of piracy (src) - so AllofMP3.com is sued for 392 years worth of damages.
3. The world music sales were 20,795 billion USD in 2005 (src) - AllofMP3.com is sued for 79 years’ of music sales (if they had been this big ever since)

Very reasonable, right?

I’m all for commercial music, but when things get this out of hands it’s just ridiculous.

I’m spending christmas with my family up in Savonlinna. As people get older in our family, we have begun to take the holiday season a little less stressfully than in the years before. This has resulted in more free time with the family as well as more time for just reading and relaxing.

I spotted an excellent set of reading for christmas from thinking with my fingers, a blog by Torill Mortensen. The new edition of game studies is out :) I also brought along from Helsinki, Freakonomics and Blink - I’ve only heard good things of them.

Little did I know when I began following her blog about 2 years ago that I would end up in a gaming company, working on a daily basis with games. Sometimes things just go as you want them to!

Happy holidays to everyone, do take time to relax and stop for a while to think of the world around you - I’m sure they will pay off one way or another.

I’m now officially a citizen of Helsinki. Feels funny. I’ve always been a citizen of Savonlinna, that beautiful small place built on three little islands. The reasons; being the capitalist that I am - tax benefits.

Have a good one :)

Iltalehti näyttää uutisoivan aika rajusti Niinistön paluusta politiikkaan.

(Sorry, a joke in Finnish regarding a funny coincident with text and photo placement)

I seldom get annoyed of things, but uneffectiveness really pisses me off in so many ways. I mean if you do something, do it well. Today’s irritator was an article from HS. Research has shown that Finns don’t check their loans with their bank once the interest rates have come down. 58% of people hadn’t re-negotiated their loans after they took it. Also, over 50% were unable to name their loan margin.

Damn, this sort of stuff just annoyes me. It sort of goes against the fact that most people run after the cheapest groceries, but neglect the single most thing that could save them tens of thousands of euros.

Haven’t had the time to blog last week, which was yet again pretty hectic. Over the weekend I exchanged e-mails with a certain Indian person wanting to publish our article in a book in India. The article was previously published in Journal of Interactive Advertising. It’s interesting to see how your work gets spread around in the internet era :)

Yesterday I held a 4-hour lecture on Internet marketing. It was an interesting experience as I really had to dig out certain things and put them on paper to talk about them. It forces you to form an opinion of most of the things you’re talking and in that sense is a sort of self-educating experience. Last, but definitely not least I endured a 4,5 hour poker tournament of No Limit Texas Hold’Em with some friends and managed to take the victory home.

An excellent way to start the weekend…